UNIVERSAL VISION

By Mike in Tokyo Rogers

Holy cow! Pay attention all you marketing, bloggers, advertising, PR, Social Media, people who U-Stream, Pick and video blog (vlog) and business in general people in Japan, I just stumbled upon this article from Nielsen Ratings that show some big trouble for Twitter down the road.

It seems that Twitter has a very poor retention rate for new users. In fact, Twitter’s retention rate is worse than Facebook or Myspace and both of those Social Networking services are dying a slow death in Japan.

From the article:

“Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.”

The problem with this retention rate is that it means that Twitter’s long term growth is in serious question. It means that Twitter can only hope for a 10 percent reach. That’s not good at all.

I have mentioned before that I think, in Japan, that Pick will blow away Twitter as Pick allows a photo to be placed right on the tweet (whereas Twitter forces the user to click a link)…

Could Twitter also face the problem that the entire Internet faced during the times of the dot-com bubble burst? That was when the Internet turned off lots of people because it was becoming too much of a tool for just selling things? Could Twitter be getting that sort of bad rap?

If Oprah Winfrey blabs about Twitter on TV and then, even she can’t retain more than 60%… Could Twitter as a product or a service be in big trouble down the road here very soon?